Westminster Sermons
C >> Charles Kingsley >> Westminster SermonsWESTMINSTER SERMONS.
WITH A PREFACE.
BY
CHARLES KINGSLEY.
London:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1881.
_The Right of Translation is Reserved_.
PREFACE.
I venture to preface these Sermons--which were preached either at
Westminster Abbey, or at one of the Chapels Royal--by a Paper read at
Sion College, in 1871; and for this reason. Even when they deal with
what is usually, and rightly, called "vital" and "experimental" religion,
they are comments on, and developments of, the idea which pervades that
paper; namely--That facts, whether of physical nature, or of the human
heart and reason, do not contradict, but coincide with, the doctrines and
formulas of the Church of England, as by law established.
* * * * *
Natural Theology, I said, is a subject which seems to me more and more
important; and one which is just now somewhat forgotten. I therefore
desire to say a few words on it. I do not pretend to teach: but only to
suggest; to point out certain problems of natural Theology, the further
solution of which ought, I think, to be soon attempted.
I wish to speak, be it remembered, not on natural religion, but on
natural Theology. By the first, I understand what can be learned from
the physical universe of man's duty to God and to his neighbour; by the
latter, I understand what can be learned concerning God Himself. Of
natural religion I shall say nothing. I do not even affirm that a
natural religion is possible: but I do very earnestly believe that a
natural Theology is possible; and I earnestly believe also that it is
most important that natural Theology should, in every age, keep pace with
doctrinal or ecclesiastical Theology.
Bishop Butler certainly held this belief. His _Analogy of Religion_,
_Natural and Revealed_, _to the Constitution and Course of Nature_--a
book for which I entertain the most profound respect--is based on a
belief that the God of nature and the God of grace are one; and that
therefore, the God who satisfies our conscience ought more or less to
satisfy our reason also. To teach that was Butler's mission; and he
fulfilled it well. But it is a mission which has to be re-fulfilled
again and again, as human thought changes, and human science develops;
for if, in any age or country, the God who seems to be revealed by nature
seems also different from the God who is revealed by the then popular
religion: then that God, and the religion which tells of that God, will
gradually cease to be believed in.
For the demands of Reason--as none knew better than good Bishop
Butler--must be and ought to be satisfied. And therefore; when a popular
war arises between the reason of any generation and its Theology: then it
behoves the ministers of religion to inquire, with all humility and godly
fear, on which side lies the fault; whether the Theology which they
expound is all that it should be, or whether the reason of those who
impugn it is all that it should be.
For me, as--I trust--an orthodox priest of the Church of England, I
believe the Theology of the National Church of England, as by law
established, to be eminently rational as well as scriptural. It is not,
therefore, surprising to me that the clergy of the Church of England,
since the foundation of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century,
have done more for sound physical science than the clergy of any other
denomination; or that the three greatest natural theologians with which
I, at least, am acquainted--Berkeley, Butler, and Paley--should have
belonged to our Church. I am not unaware of what the Germans of the
eighteenth century have done. I consider Goethe's claims to have
advanced natural Theology very much over-rated: but I do recommend to
young clergymen Herder's _Outlines of the Philosophy of the History of
Man_ as a book--in spite of certain defects--full of sound and precious
wisdom. Meanwhile it seems to me that English natural Theology in the
eighteenth century stood more secure than that of any other nation, on
the foundation which Berkeley, Butler, and Paley had laid; and that if
our orthodox thinkers for the last hundred years had followed steadily in
their steps, we should not be deploring now a wide, and as some think
increasing, divorce between Science and Christianity.
But it was not so to be. The impulse given by Wesley and Whitfield
turned--and not before it was needed--the earnest minds of England almost
exclusively to questions of personal religion; and that impulse, under
many unexpected forms, has continued ever since. I only state the fact:
I do not deplore it; God forbid. Wisdom is justified of all her
children; and as, according to the wise American, "it takes all sorts to
make a world," so it takes all sorts to make a living Church. But that
the religious temper of England for the last two or three generations has
been unfavourable to a sound and scientific development of natural
Theology, there can be no doubt.
We have only, if we need proof, to look at the hymns--many of them very
pure, pious, and beautiful--which are used at this day in churches and
chapels by persons of every shade of opinion. How often is the tone in
which they speak of the natural world one of dissatisfaction, distrust,
almost contempt. "Change and decay in all around I see," is their key-
note, rather than "O all ye works of the Lord, bless Him, praise Him, and
magnify Him for ever." There lingers about them a savour of the old
monastic theory, that this earth is the devil's planet, fallen, accursed,
goblin-haunted, needing to be exorcised at every turn before it is useful
or even safe for man. An age which has adopted as its most popular hymn
a paraphrase of the mediaeval monk's "Hic breve vivitur," and in which
stalwart public-school boys are bidden in their chapel-worship to tell
the Almighty God of Truth that they lie awake weeping at night for joy at
the thought that they will die and see "Jerusalem the Golden," is
doubtless a pious and devout age: but not--at least as yet--an age in
which natural Theology is likely to attain a high, a healthy, or a
scriptural development.
Not a scriptural development. Let me press on you, my clerical brethren,
most earnestly this one point. It is time that we should make up our
minds what tone Scripture does take toward nature, natural science,
natural Theology. Most of you, I doubt not, have made up your minds
already; and in consequence have no fear of natural science, no fear for
natural Theology. But I cannot deny that I find still lingering here and
there certain of the old views of nature of which I used to hear but too
much some five-and-thirty years ago--and that from better men than I
shall ever hope to be--who used to consider natural Theology as useless,
fallacious, impossible; on the ground that this Earth did not reveal the
will and character of God, because it was cursed and fallen; and that its
facts, in consequence, were not to be respected or relied on. This, I
was told, was the doctrine of Scripture, and was therefore true. But
when, longing to reconcile my conscience and my reason on a question so
awful to a young student of natural science, I went to my Bible, what did
I find? No word of all this. Much--thank God, I may say one continuous
undercurrent--of the very opposite of all this. I pray you bear with me,
even though I may seem impertinent. But what do we find in the Bible,
with the exception of that first curse? That, remember, cannot mean any
alteration in the laws of nature by which man's labour should only
produce for him henceforth thorns and thistles. For, in the first place,
any such curse is formally abrogated in the eighth chapter and 21st verse
of the very same document--"I will not again curse the earth any more for
man's sake. While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, cold and
heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease." And next: the
fact is not so; for if you root up the thorns and thistles, and keep your
land clean, then assuredly you will grow fruit-trees and not thorns,
wheat and not thistles, according to those laws of nature which are the
voice of God expressed in facts.
And yet the words are true. There is a curse upon the earth: though not
one which, by altering the laws of nature, has made natural facts
untrustworthy. There is a curse on the earth; such a curse as is
expressed, I believe, in the old Hebrew text, where the word
"_admah_"--correctly translated in our version "the ground"--signifies,
as I am told, not this planet, but simply the soil from whence we get our
food; such a curse as certainly is expressed by the Septuagint and the
Vulgate versions: "Cursed is the earth"--[Greek text]; "in opere tuo,"
"in thy works." Man's work is too often the curse of the very planet
which he misuses. None should know that better than the botanist, who
sees whole regions desolate, and given up to sterility and literal thorns
and thistles, on account of man's sin and folly, ignorance and greedy
waste. Well said that veteran botanist, the venerable Elias Fries, of
Lund:--
"A broad band of waste land follows gradually in the steps of
cultivation. If it expands, its centre and its cradle dies, and on the
outer borders only do we find green shoots. But it is not impossible,
only difficult, for man, without renouncing the advantage of culture
itself, one day to make reparation for the injury which he has inflicted:
he is appointed lord of creation. True it is that thorns and thistles,
ill-favoured and poisonous plants, well named by botanists rubbish
plants, mark the track which man has proudly traversed through the earth.
Before him lay original nature in her wild but sublime beauty. Behind
him he leaves a desert, a deformed and ruined land; for childish desire
of destruction, or thoughtless squandering of vegetable treasures, has
destroyed the character of nature; and, terrified, man himself flies from
the arena of his actions, leaving the impoverished earth to barbarous
races or to animals, so long as yet another spot in virgin beauty smiles
before him. Here again, in selfish pursuit of profit, and consciously or
unconsciously following the abominable principle of the great moral
vileness which one man has expressed--'Apres nous le Deluge,'--he begins
anew the work of destruction. Thus did cultivation, driven out, leave
the East, and perhaps the deserts long ago robbed of their coverings;
like the wild hordes of old over beautiful Greece, thus rolls this
conquest with fearful rapidity from East to West through America; and the
planter now often leaves the already exhausted land, and the eastern
climate, become infertile through the demolition of the forests, to
introduce a similar revolution into the Far West."
As we proceed, we find nothing in the general tone of Scripture which can
hinder our natural Theology being at once scriptural and scientific.
If it is to be scientific, it must begin by approaching Nature at once
with a cheerful and reverent spirit, as a noble, healthy, and trustworthy
thing; and what is that, save the spirit of those who wrote the 104th,
147th, and 148th Psalms; the spirit, too, of him who wrote that Song of
the Three Children, which is, as it were, the flower and crown of the Old
Testament, the summing up of all that is most true and eternal in the old
Jewish faith; and which, as long as it is sung in our churches, is the
charter and title-deed of all Christian students of those works of the
Lord, which it calls on to bless Him, praise Him, and magnify Him for
ever?
What next will be demanded of us by physical science? Belief, certainly,
just now, in the permanence of natural laws. That is taken for granted,
I hold, throughout the Bible. I cannot see how our Lord's parables,
drawn from the birds and the flowers, the seasons and the weather, have
any logical weight, or can be considered as aught but capricious and
fanciful "illustrations"--which God forbid--unless we look at them as
instances of laws of the natural world, which find their analogues in the
laws of the spiritual world, the kingdom of God. I cannot conceive a
man's writing that 104th Psalm who had not the most deep, the most
earnest sense of the permanence of natural law. But more: the fact is
expressly asserted again and again. "They continue this day according to
Thine ordinance, for all things serve Thee." "Thou hast made them fast
for ever and ever. Thou hast given them a law which shall not be
broken--"
Let us pass on. There is no more to be said about this matter.
But next: it will be demanded of us that natural Theology shall set forth
a God whose character is consistent with all the facts of nature, and not
only with those which are pleasant and beautiful. That challenge was
accepted, and I think victoriously, by Bishop Butler, as far as the
Christian religion is concerned. As far as the Scripture is concerned,
we may answer thus--
It is said to us--I know that it is said--You tell us of a God of love, a
God of flowers and sunshine, of singing birds and little children. But
there are more facts in nature than these. There is premature death,
pestilence, famine. And if you answer--Man has control over these; they
are caused by man's ignorance and sin, and by his breaking of natural
laws:--What will you make of those destructive powers over which he has
no control; of the hurricane and the earthquake; of poisons, vegetable
and mineral; of those parasitic Entozoa whose awful abundance, and awful
destructiveness, in man and beast, science is just revealing--a new page
of danger and loathsomeness? How does that suit your conception of a God
of love?
We can answer--Whether or not it suits our conception of a God of love,
it suits Scripture's conception of Him. For nothing is more clear--nay,
is it not urged again and again, as a blot on Scripture?--that it reveals
a God not merely of love, but of sternness; a God in whose eyes physical
pain is not the worst of evils, nor animal life--too often miscalled
human life--the most precious of objects; a God who destroys, when it
seems fit to Him, and that wholesale, and seemingly without either pity
or discrimination, man, woman, and child, visiting the sins of the
fathers on the children, making the land empty and bare, and destroying
from off it man and beast? This is the God of the Old Testament. And if
any say--as is too often rashly said--This is not the God of the New: I
answer, But have you read your New Testament? Have you read the latter
chapters of St Matthew? Have you read the opening of the Epistle to the
Romans? Have you read the Book of Revelation? If so, will you say that
the God of the New Testament is, compared with the God of the Old, less
awful, less destructive, and therefore less like the Being--granting
always that there is such a Being--who presides over nature and her
destructive powers? It is an awful problem. But the writers of the
Bible have faced it valiantly. Physical science is facing it valiantly
now. Therefore natural Theology may face it likewise. Remember
Carlyle's great words about poor Francesca in the Inferno: "Infinite
pity: yet also infinite rigour of law. It is so Nature is made. It is
so Dante discerned that she was made."
There are two other points on which I must beg leave to say a few words.
Physical science will demand of our natural theologians that they should
be aware of their importance, and let--as Mr Matthew Arnold would
say--their thoughts play freely round them. I mean questions of
Embryology, and questions of Race.
On the first there may be much to be said, which is, for the present,
best left unsaid, even here. I only ask you to recollect how often in
Scripture those two plain old words--beget and bring forth--occur; and in
what important passages. And I ask you to remember that marvellous essay
on Natural Theology--if I may so call it in all reverence--namely, the
119th Psalm; and judge for yourself whether he who wrote that did not
consider the study of Embryology as important, as significant, as worthy
of his deepest attention, as an Owen, a Huxley, or a Darwin. Nay, I will
go further still, and say, that in those great words--"Thine eyes did see
my substance, yet being imperfect; and in Thy book all my members were
written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none
of them,"--in those words, I say, the Psalmist has anticipated that
realistic view of embryological questions to which our most modern
philosophers are, it seems to me, slowly, half unconsciously, but still
inevitably, returning.
Next, as to Race. Some persons now have a nervous fear of that word, and
of allowing any importance to difference of races. Some dislike it,
because they think that it endangers the modern notions of democratic
equality. Others because they fear that it may be proved that the Negro
is not a man and a brother. I think the fears of both parties
groundless.
As for the Negro, I not only believe him to be of the same race as
myself, but that--if Mr Darwin's theories are true--science has proved
that he must be such. I should have thought, as a humble student of such
questions, that the one fact of the unique distribution of the hair in
all races of human beings, was full moral proof that they had all had one
common ancestor. But this is not matter of natural Theology. What is
matter thereof, is this.
Physical science is proving more and more the immense importance of Race;
the importance of hereditary powers, hereditary organs, hereditary
habits, in all organized beings, from the lowest plant to the highest
animal. She is proving more and more the omnipresent action of the
differences between races: how the more "favoured" race--she cannot avoid
using the epithet--exterminates the less favoured; or at least expels it,
and forces it, under penalty of death, to adapt itself to new
circumstances; and, in a word, that competition between every race and
every individual of that race, and reward according to deserts, is, as
far as we can see, an universal law of living things. And she says--for
the facts of History prove it--that as it is among the races of plants
and animals, so it has been unto this day among the races of men.
The natural Theology of the future must take count of these tremendous
and even painful facts. She may take count of them. For Scripture has
taken count of them already. It talks continually--it has been blamed
for talking so much--of races; of families; of their wars, their
struggles, their exterminations; of races favoured, of races rejected; of
remnants being saved, to continue the race; of hereditary tendencies,
hereditary excellencies, hereditary guilt. Its sense of the reality and
importance of descent is so intense, that it speaks of a whole tribe or a
whole family by the name of its common ancestor; and the whole nation of
the Jews is Israel, to the end. And if I be told this is true of the Old
Testament, but not of the New: I must answer,--What? Does not St Paul
hold the identity of the whole Jewish race with Israel their forefather,
as strongly as any prophet of the Old Testament? And what is the central
historic fact, save One, of the New Testament, but the conquest of
Jerusalem; the dispersion, all but destruction of a race, not by miracle,
but by invasion, because found wanting when weighed in the stern balances
of natural and social law?
Think over this. I only suggest the thought: but I do not suggest it in
haste. Think over it, by the light which our Lord's parables, His
analogies between the physical and social constitution of the world,
afford; and consider whether those awful words--fulfilled then, and
fulfilled so often since--"The kingdom of God shall be taken from you,
and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof," may not be the
supreme instance, the most complex development, of a law which runs
through all created things, down to the moss which struggles for
existence on the rock.
Do I say that this is all? That man is merely a part of nature, the
puppet of circumstances and hereditary tendencies? That brute
competition is the one law of his life? That he is doomed for ever to be
the slave of his own needs, enforced by an internecine struggle for
existence? God forbid. I believe not only in nature, but in Grace. I
believe that this is man's fate only as long as he sows to the flesh, and
of the flesh reaps corruption. I believe that if he will
Strive upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die;
if he will be even as wise as the social animals; as the ant and the bee,
who have risen, if not to the virtue of all-embracing charity, at least
to the virtues of self-sacrifice and patriotism: then he will rise
towards a higher sphere; towards that kingdom of God of which it is
written--"He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him."
Whether that be matter of natural Theology, I cannot tell as yet. But as
for all the former questions; and all that St Paul means when he talks of
the law, and how the works of the flesh bring men under the law, stern
and terrible and destructive, though holy and just and good,--they are
matter of natural Theology; and I believe that here, as elsewhere,
Scripture and Science will be ultimately found to coincide.
But here we have to face an objection which you will often hear now from
scientific men, and still oftener from non-scientific men; who will
say--It matters not to us whether Scripture contradicts or does not
contradict a scientific natural Theology; for we hold such a science to
be impossible and naught. The old Jews put a God into nature; and
therefore of course they could see, as you see, what they had already put
there. But we see no God in nature. We do not deny the existence of a
God. We merely say that scientific research does not reveal Him to us.
We see no marks of design in physical phenomena. What used to be
considered as marks of design can be better explained by considering them
as the results of evolution according to necessary laws; and you and
Scripture make a mere assumption when you ascribe them to the operation
of a mind like the human mind.
Now on this point I believe we may answer fearlessly--If you cannot see
it, we cannot help you. If the heavens do not declare to you the glory
of God, nor the firmament show you His handy-work, then our poor
arguments will not show them. "The eye can only see that which it brings
with it the power of seeing." We can only reassert that we see design
everywhere; and that the vast majority of the human race in every age and
clime has seen it. Analogy from experience, sound induction--as we
hold--from the works not only of men but of animals, has made it an all
but self-evident truth to us, that wherever there is arrangement, there
must be an arranger; wherever there is adaptation of means to an end,
there must be an adapter; wherever an organization, there must be an
organizer. The existence of a designing God is no more demonstrable from
nature than the existence of other human beings independent of ourselves;
or, indeed, than the existence of our own bodies. But, like the belief
in them, the belief in Him has become an article of our common sense. And
that this designing mind is, in some respects, similar to the human mind,
is proved to us--as Sir John Herschel well puts it--by the mere fact that
we can discover and comprehend the processes of nature.
But here again, if we be contradicted, we can only reassert. If the old
words, "He that made the eye, shall he not see? he that planted the ear,
shall he not hear?" do not at once commend themselves to the intellect of
any person, we shall never convince that person by any arguments drawn
from the absurdity of conceiving the invention of optics by a blind man,
or of music by a deaf one.
So we will assert our own old-fashioned notion boldly: and more; we will
say, in spite of ridicule--That if such a God exists, final causes must
exist also. That the whole universe must be one chain of final causes.
That if there be a Supreme Reason, he must have reason, and that a good
reason, for every physical phenomenon.
We will tell the modern scientific man--You are nervously afraid of the
mention of final causes. You quote against them Bacon's saying, that
they are barren virgins; that no physical fact was ever discovered or
explained by them. You are right: as far as regards yourselves. You
have no business with final causes; because final causes are moral
causes: and you are physical students only. We, the natural Theologians,
have business with them. Your duty is to find out the How of things:
ours, to find out the Why. If you rejoin that we shall never find out
the Why, unless we first learn something of the How, we shall not deny
that. It may be most useful, I had almost said necessary, that the
clergy should have some scientific training. It may be most useful--I
sometimes dream of a day when it will be considered necessary--that every
candidate for Ordination should be required to have passed creditably in
at least one branch of physical science, if it be only to teach him the
method of sound scientific thought. But our having learnt the How, will
not make it needless, much less impossible, for us to study the Why. It
will merely make more clear to us the things of which we have to study
the Why; and enable us to keep the How and the Why more religiously apart
from each other.